The Census Taker Asks Me to Tell Her About Myself
Well Terri, I’m afraid
of catfish—not their tunneling mouths,
but the paradoxical combination
of predator and prey in cat/fish—
I’m afraid of
My son is fifteen when he asks the first question I am unable to answer.
When the Santa Anas whipped into town, everyone became a little crazier. They invited the wildfires as if to burn the witches amongst us.
Upon receiving the Pritzker Prize at 42, Welk gained a modest international celebrity and spent his 40s and early 50s galivanting around Europe, Southeast Asia and various island nations overseeing a dizzying array of projects that he believed, in some small way, changed the world for the better.
In early June of the never-ending 2020, I attended an anti-curfew, anti-police terror demonstration in my hometown of Oakland, California.
It was a warm evening as myself and a couple friends
Junior year of college, he touched the scab on the crease of my mouth where concealer failed me. I get these in the winter too, he said, and then, I have a cream.
It’s all about the timing
It’s as simple and invasive as a chime on my phone. A banner news alert, which, for most people, involves elections and wars and natural disasters and celebrity
At the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, I browse the gift shop. It’s scented lavender from a leg-shaped diffuser in the corner.
My last suicide attempt was in a park called Jesus Green. I said ‘last’ because I gave up, not because it worked. Writing plays tricks with life and death so you need to make things clear.
I’m Writing from the Other Side of the Universe to Ask You How the Weather Is
This is a soft rain, my father says, his forehead a creased encyclopedia page. It is mao mao yu in Chinese, syllables
Seventeen days since you spoke your last words to me. They repeat themselves in my mind, I never want to forget them.
I am not a pinch, a spoonful, a half a cup of light rivering down into the stomach where, I should know, the heart truly resides.
George Simmons used to sling crack on 42nd St.—why his uptown boys always called him The Midtown Turn. Now he’s 54—and everybody calls him Pop. He’s been running the streets for decades. “The streets
I didn’t turn around because I wasn’t entirely sure my name was being called and even so there was no one I wanted to talk to on the street in the middle of this particular Tuesday.
The first time I was shot I was fifteen and I deserved it. I broke into a run-down lurch, an ancient moonshiners' abandoned cabin in the forest.
And yet, and yet, from the rear pew of my mind came a rude slurping as my straw probed the ice of a Pepsi.
We get back together, because of course we do. He is better, now. Therapy helps both of us.
Dan texted his wife before going on the ventilator. She shares most things on Facebook, and she has disclosed this last message, too.
Consideration of Deferred Action for Chilhood Arrivals
This is when your humanity ends, when a pen hits this paper.
...I'm part of this thing where fish learned to walk...
This spring was cloudy + wet so the world is green, green, green.
Tom Selleck, in his best reverse mortgage voice, volunteers to call your parents and break the news that their daughter almost died. Your mom is happy to hear from him since she always liked Magnum P.I.
Big Bob sat beside me and watched women he classified as MILFs walk their kids to the pool with large, clear tubes.
